Forum News

"Intelligent transportation" is all around us: in our cars, on the roads, with new and innovative applications being conceived and deployed on a regular basis. The proliferation of Intelligent Transportation technologies are impacting many government functions, such as revenue collection, public safety, cybersecurity protection and the citizen experience.

An understanding of Intelligent Transportation solutions is important to the policy, security and the technology sectors of government. The new architectures, evolving standards and the eventual system integrations of these new solutions are areas of concern, and opportunity, for our technology community.

The NYS Forum is facilitating an Intelligent Transportation Collaboration for State, City and Authority agencies within New York State. The goal of this collaboration is to provide opportunities for knowledge sharing and education across the government entities.

April 20th marked the first session of the series to set the stage and introduce the relevant concepts, standards and architecture. A crowd of roughly 60 members attended, "Session 1: An Introduction to Intelligent Transportation" at the NYC Department of Transportation in downtown Manhattan. Presenters included: Robert S. Jaffe, Ph.D., CSEP - President, Consensus Systems Technologies, Kim McKinney, Chief Technology Officer - NYS Thruway Authority, and Brian Digman, Director of IT - NYS Thruway Authority.

Robert Jaffe focused his presentation on defining intelligent transportation, familiar use cases, the major stakeholders, and how the different levels of standards: national and regional come together into a comprehensive architecture.

The team from the NYS Thruway Authority gave shared an overview of the Authorities'' Intelligent Transportation initiatives and their vision for the future.

Following the presentation, there was an active and dynamic Q&A/Open Discussion session involving those in person and on the webex. The event was extremely constructive and turned into an invigorating and captivating exchange of information and ideas providing much food for thought and plans for action.